“No more free-riders. Everybody has to share responsibility so we can keep a healthy workforce and keep it strong,” said Landrieu in her defense of ObamaCare. “If I had to vote for the bill again, I would vote for it tomorrow.”

The “free-rider” argument is one of the many arguments that the Obama Administration and its supporters have made about the law. The individual mandate was designed to combat thus problem by forcing Americans to pay for health insurance coverage or face a punitive tax. But ObamaCare ultimately doesn’t do much about free-riders, those who don’t purchase health insurance and can’t or don’t pay for healthcare services they consume.

Avik Roy wrote back in 2011 that the Massachusetts’ healthcare law, the model for ObamaCare, hasn’t done much to cut uncompensated care in correlation with how much taxpayers are spending on subsidies for health insurance.

“Yes, Massachusetts has saved about $250 million in uncompensated care,” noted Roy. “On the other hand, in 2011, the state’s insurance subsidies will cost more than $830 million, and are growing at 5% a year.”

He also noted that uncompensated care isn’t really that big of an issue, accounting for only 1.79% of national healthcare expenditures. Roy explained that free-riders are a creation of “clumsy government policy.”

And even the Obama Administration has conceded that the individual mandate wouldn’t apply to Americans who would spend more than 8% of their income on health insurance or those who are eligible for Medicaid.

Despite implementation problems and higher insurance premiums, which are expected to rise by 28% in Louisiana, Landrieu insists that ObamaCare is “going to be better than the old system, which was that less and less people had insurance.”